To Choose Pain Any Day: Poetry, Criticism, and Recovery

To Choose Pain Any Day: Poetry, Criticism, and Recovery

In the essay “Notes on Poetry and Spirituality,” Robert Hass, writing of Emily Dickinson’s “There’s a certain Slant of light,” remarks that for the speaker of the poem “the choice is between a kind of pain and a kind of deadness, and she would choose that pain any day.”1 For some reason, Hass’s discussion of this choice between “a kind of pain and a kind of deadness” reminded me of the work I’ve done and still do in drug recovery. In the case of recovery, the individual in treatment, the “addict” or “user,” is asked to choose a good deal of pain over a good deal of deadness--the pain being that of life chemically unaltered (or at least less chemically altered); the deadness being that of addiction, of obsession and compulsion.

Yet, it’s not all that simple. Asking someone to relinquish his drug of choice also demands choosing certain kinds of deadness over certain kinds of pain. Relinquishing substances forces the individual in recovery to grapple (perhaps for the first time in years) with unfiltered reality. In relation to this grappling with reality, poet Joshua Mehigan writes of his own experience, “Quitting alcohol boldly foregrounded my prime reason for seeking oblivion: reality. Everyone occasionally feels dissatisfied with reality, but some people are born with a vicious jones to break free from it.”2 Indeed, perhaps some understanding of this “vicious jones to break free” from reality is universal. “Reality,” after all, is far from perfect. It is often accompanied by violence, despair, fear, and many forms of drubbing banality. The dullness and deadness, for example, of nearly any Monday night of the year with nothing good to watch or eat or do and a whole week spread out before you in all its undazzling regularity, and all of it about as exciting as a moderately successful bowel movement. And when this deadness, this deadness of the ordinary, sober lifestyle, this deadness of the daily, of the day to day, of the day in and day out, of the every day, of day after day after day--when this deadness is presented to the recovering individual and compared to the more exotic pain of his addictive behavior, of his using past, of his many wild and reckless and seemingly impossibly exuberant inebriations--yes, when the potential daily deadness of a sober life is held up against the sweetness of the pain he has known (the many brutal and total sacraments and rituals of getting high and staying high and acquiring the resources necessary to get and stay high into the foreseeable future), this simple dichotomy of choosing the pain of the recovering life over the deadness of addiction grows rather more complex.  

Similarly this dichotomy--one between pain and deadness (or death)--takes on nearly nauseating complexity in Hass’s long poem “Songs to Survive the Summer.” The landscape of the poem is one where the neighbor’s mother dies, plunging into the space between tercets,3 only to reemerge in order to teach the speaker’s daughter to weave on a toy loom and to welcome her into painful, sleepless nights where every siren’s wail means someone else is dead. It is, too, a landscape where a Steller jay first appears squawking from a plum tree, “a hard, indifferent bird” ready to “snatch your life,” and only many stanzas later receives its name from Wilhelm Steller, “a mean impatient man // born low enough / to hate the lower class.”4

Perhaps most tellingly, the play of pain and death within the poem climaxes with the poem’s concluding eight tercets set to define death even as they revisit the mingled sweet, bitter, and sour aspects of life within the poem:

That is what I have

to give you, child, stories,

songs, loquat seeds,

curiously shaped; they

are the frailest stay against

our fears. Death

in the sweetness, in the bitter

and the sour, death

in the salt, your tears,

this summer ripe and overripe

It is a taste in the mouth,

child. We are the song

death takes its own time

singing. It calls us

as I call you child

to calm myself. It is every

thing touched casually,

lovers, the images

of saviors, books, the coin

I carried in my pocket

till it shone, it is

all things lustered

by the steady thoughtlessness

of human use.5

I’m still not sure why Hass’s quote about Dickinson or his “Songs to Survive the Summer” got me thinking about drug recovery. But they did. Specifically they got me thinking about a weekly poetry group I run in a local adolescent treatment program. Indeed in the context of my experiences in this group, Hass’s poetry and his indication that poetry might help us in choosing “a kind of pain”  over “a kind of deadness,” led me to consider a flurry of questions: How do the stories, songs, and loquat seeds help?  How does poetry possibly mediate between pain and deadness? How might poetry help us appreciate the “all things lustered / by the steady thoughtlessness / of human use” ? How might poetry enable us to choose a kind of pain over a kind of deadness? To choose that pain any day? Yes, to choose that pain any day?

These are the questions the rest of this “essay” attempts to engage--usually not directly, often narratively, and always bewilderedly. These are the questions this piece roots its various vignettes and considerations in. These are the questions taken up, studied, weighed by the tongue, and, hopefully, shined to a bit more clarity by the process, put down again herein.

Group I: An Introduction

I wait in the cool basement of the treatment facility with dinner smells wafting down from above.  The walls are fragmented with handcrafted posters and motivational quotes (“The universe is made of tiny stories;” “The purpose of life is a life of purpose.”). The wall behind my seat is painted a serene blue-green, nicked through to a yellowing ivory in many places. The north and east walls are cement. The south and west are plaster. There are no windows, and the carpet is darkly colored, yet through the southwest door the sun makes small inroads. After arranging the long white rectangular tables and gray plastic chairs the way I want them, I sit down. I write a few lines and wait for the steps to thunder down the stairs, the voices to bless again this hollow with their hallow tones.

Today as I wait, I recall the whamming headache I experienced earlier. The kind where you bury your face in your hands and pray for the world to end, for the sweet dark to take you. The kind that sets you to anointing toilet bowls with your recent lunch. The kind that hurts so bad it makes you drowsy. Getting up from the table where I’ve set myself, I consider that I’m feeling much better now. And as I begin to write part of a Robert Hass poem on the board, I wonder about pain. A kind of pain and a kind of death. What will we choose tonight?

On the whiteboard the lines for the evening (as much as I can fit and still expect to be legible to those in the back of the room) read:

Under the loquat tree.

It’s almost a song,

the echo of a song:

on the bat’s back I fly

merrily toward sumer

or at high noon

in the outfield clover

guzzling Orange Crush,

time endless, examining

a wooden coin I’d carried

all through summer

without knowing it.

The coin was grandpa’s joke,

carved from live oak,

Indian side and buffalo side.

His eyes lustered with mirth

so deep and rich he never

laughed, as if it were a cosmic

secret that we shared.

I never understood; it married

in my mind with summer. Don’t

take any wooden nickels,

kid, and gave me one

under the loquat tree.6

In this poem, the kids find the tension between personal and economic value. One boy points out that the grandfather is encouraging his son not to take what’s valuable to others--just a wooden nickel to you may be a prized treasure to someone else. You never know. Another thinks the Indian and buffalo are important, and the message is to cherish what you worship, remember it, don’t just let it sit in your pocket. One girl sees a message about toughness; don’t take stuff from anyone she says. “Like their stuff?” I ask. “No, like don’t take sh** from anyone.”

Towards the end of group, one client, a boy I’ve know since he was 12 and seen through half a dozen inpatient stints, tells me that he’s leaving, again. He wants a poem to send him on his way. I write one in red ink on a half sheet of wide-ruled paper. In it the stars are singing. Their song is filled with hope. The central figure can choose the next right thing. The small light of caring faces illuminates his imagination. The warmth of hands held out in gestures of hope brighten the cold, shimmer in the dark. This time he’ll make it. This central character. As sure as the poem ends, he’ll make it.

Still, the lines keep coming. The lines loop out, one upon another as snakes eating their own tails. As sure as the poem might end, he’ll make it. As sure as the poem, he’ll make it. I hand this poem to him as talisman or memento, as instructional manual or wooden nickel: the lines and curves of my scribbled letters like so many hieroglyphs of dried blood, only brighter. “Good luck,” I say. “Thanks,” he replies, leaving the room.

I use a cheap, wet paper towel to wipe Hass off the board. The words streak into green like a split loquat leaves spilt over the wall. I dry the surface with a another towel, licking up the residual smudge, but the board stays blotched w/ reds and greens and blues--poems and words and figures bruised into the surface.   

Group II: All Saints Day

Tonight the turquoise walls are decorated with brown, black, and orange tombstones. Some are marked with the names of the people who made them: R.I.P. Here lies Nick (1999-2015). Some are marked with fictional names: R.I.P. Gary R. Sober or Drugs or Spook E. or Dawn O’dadead. Accompanying the construction paper tombstones are coloring book pages of grinning gargoyles, witches, and Frankenstein. Under a cheap plastic clock is a list of male-female restrictions: Josh cannot talk or look at Bethany. Bethany cannot talk or look at Tim. Tim cannot talk or look at Tina. Tina cannot talk or look at Dan. Opposite these restrictions, a bulletin board hangs with the phrase “LIVING OVER EXISTING” emblazoned in shades of sunset reds and oranges against a black background. The letters are bubbled and neatly cut out of white paper. Upstairs, after dinner, the group begins to sing “Let It Go” in unison.

In group, We write poems beginning with the line “Once my father drew the face of the moon.”7 We take turns adding lines to this. And so, line by line, we create a word bank, a repository of set phrases we might finagle into our own poetic arrangements.

“Once my father drew the face of the moon.” A girl named Reese culled that line from a copy of Rattle Poetry two weeks before when we were exploring works of poetry in search of language through which we might bend the small light of each of our breaths.

It’s really an exquisite line, one that at once evokes poetry’s indebtedness to ancestry, mystery, the natural world, craft, and made images. In sum, “Once my father drew the face of the moon” proves a raw distillate of poetic essence. Yes, Reese, what more needs to be said? What more can we say?

But in group we write on anyway. We speak lines both garbled and clean, rhymed and chimed and inexplicable, mundane and mystical, lines both expected and unforeseen.  “Once my father drew the face of the moon”:

--and put me in a stunning daze

--as a light flicked through the sky

--on the stain glass

--that’s when I say goodnight

We write and speak these words in addition to “Once my father drew the face of the moon” much as someone watching her father draw a face would, much as someone staring at the moon might: not because it’s needed but because we must.

We must. We must try at least to embrace what the moon, a father, a face (any face), the act of creation could mean. Must because how else are we to come to know the beauty of our vision, the gravity of the truth, the pain of what has been, and is, and may someday be again. Must, if nothing else, because we like our fathers before us must create. And even if it’s not the same face of the moon we draw with our words, it must be something, it must be; for the urge to both imitate and create is irrepressible.

Months later, revisiting “Once my father drew the face of the moon,” I realize that in the original, the poem resolves “before / he got drunk and left.” So that makes a whole haiku reading, “Once my father drew / the face of the moon before / he got drunk and left.”8 Reading this, I’m not surprised. Somehow resolving the phrase like this makes sense, is expected almost. The mixture of the past tense, with the declaration of a singular occurrence, with the mystery of the personified moon, doesn’t exactly create a tone, or expectation of happiness, of forthcoming serene resolution. And certainly, in a recovery setting there’s a way it’s all the more fitting that, “Once my father drew / the face of the moon” is, in the original, followed by “before / he got drunk and left.” In this way, our play with this phrase becomes more than just a game of creating poems, or some sort of metaphorical  imitation of a father drawing the face of the moon. Instead, our play here with poetry becomes an act of resistance against “before / he got drunk and left”--our poetry group becomes a recovery group in the very act of defying both oblivion (got drunk) and abandonment (and left). “Once my father drew the face of the moon…” Through poetry we attempt to return to the time and state before the “before”; we attempt to return to the once, to the creating, to the raw mystery of the moon.

Group III: “Those Winter Sundays”

Today the poem of the week is Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” The whiteboard is positioned so that I have to kneel to write the last two lines of the second stanza, “and slowly I would rise and dress / fearing the chronic anger of that house.”9 Kneeling in this way is both worshipful and reminiscent of brokenness--one falling down at the overwhelming weight of it all: both beauty and pain, wonder and despair.

Finishing this second stanza, I rise to write the next, driving towards the poem’s final couplet. And I’m on my feet again, only slightly bowed when I begin “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices.”10 Now, with these final lines, if we are to make of this poem an allegory of recovery, recovery might be termed a way of learning to see differently, learning to be grateful, to commit to the hard work of love, to remain committed to this work despite the “chronic anger of [the] house” where each may find himself.

After discussing this poem, we turn to making approximations of sonnet lines. Each individual is to take five strips of torn paper, writing a separate line on every strip. Once this is done, I collect and distribute the strips between two groups. Both groups compose their own sonnets using the lines they received.

When group ends, I am left with a literal pile of discordant lines:

Stare into the sun, blurred vision with colors

The child smelled like peanut butter and flowers.

The bumblebee stung me in the eye

The tree tickled the top of the log cabin

I got money and I got pizza

Those blues got me confused

My mom too busy cookin dope up in the kitchen

I was beggin her to stop but she wasn’t tryna to listen.

These lines in turn remind me of other lines and stanzas I’ve culled from past groups:

Love is only a word until you enforce it

Regret is a shadow I can’t outrun.

The void whispers my name

The fire in your eyes meant the complete wrong thing

Seeing you silent is the biggest cry

Moses throws a xylophone and hits his mark

Hardly a catastrophe / Mac’n’cheese

Jupiter is a cup of stuffed lions

Jupiter is flat as a guitar

Razor tips against my lips

You fall into me

like a body into a grave

a dead body

a shallow grave

You love me

like a French fry loves ketchup

a crispy fry

a cool pool of ketchup

You fit into me

like confetti into a city park fountain

blue confetti

a dry fountain

You trouble me

like a stone dropped into a pond

a cold pond

a smooth stone.11

What of these lines? These remnants? Where do they leave us? Them? Me? Where now are the voices that spoke them, the hands that wrote them, the minds that composed them?

Group IV: Anne Sexton

I remember teaching a Sexton poem in a poetry group a couple years ago. The lesson was focused on stanzas, and lineation, and how a poem is organized. For some reason, I decided a fitting poem to help me model these concepts was Sexton’s “You, Doctor Martin,” the first poem in her first published collection To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960). So there we were, ten or so of us, in a small windowless room with beige walls and the poem--I had snipped up line by line--cut into several dozen white slips of paper and spread out on the brown carpet. My charge to the students, put it back together again. What would we make of Doctor Martin?

“You, Doctor Martin, walk” stumbled into “tomorrow. Of course, I love you...”

“from breakfast to madness. Late August”  fell into “in school. There are no knives…”

“I speed through the antiseptic tunnel” whirled right into “of dinner. The shibboleth is spoken…”

“where the moving dead still talk” married “they used to work. Now I learn to take…” “of pushing their bones against the thrust” pulled up “of death. We stand in broken…” “of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel” slipped naturally into “here. All over I grow most tall…”

“or the laughing bee on a stalk” rhymed with “and we move to gravy in our smock…”12

I want to believe that after this general jumble, they still stuck the ending:

And we are magic talking to itself,

noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins

forgotten. Am I still lost?

Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,

counting this row and that row of moccasins

waiting on the silent shelf.13

In any case, looking back within the frame of recovery, I’d like to converse with Sexton’s ending a bit. First, yes, let’s be “magic talking to itself,” be “noisy,” but not “alone.” When we come  into a room, any room, and we turn our breath and attention to poetry aren’t we, then, together? In fact, even if the “we” is just an “I,” the act of speaking a poem out loud, or subvocalizing it to oneself, or just running one’s mind over the words, makes together. Doesn’t it?

“I am queen of all my sins / forgotten.” Yes, let us own our sins, even the forgotten ones, even the misremembered ones, even the potentially unrealized ones. Or as The Book of Common Prayer puts it? “We confess that we have sinned...by what have done, / and by what what we have left undone.”14

“Am I still lost?” God, Anne, if only I could answer that for you, or me, or any of us.

“Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself…” This is devastating. Actually, I don’t know what this means, exactly, but I know it’s devastating just the same. And I think, what am I doing here, why poetry, what am I trying to teach if not this correspondence, this awful tension between beauty and self?

“...counting this row and that row of moccasins / waiting on the silent shelf”? Are they all there, Ms. Sexton? Have any been misplaced? What do we gain by counting, by accounting for what our hands have made? Can you forgive our rearranging and examination of your moccasins row by row, foot by foot?   

Maybe here with Sexton is as good, or better, a place to end as any. After all in terms of “recovery,” poetry was vital for Sexton. Maxine Kumin in introducing the 1999 The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton goes so far as to claim:

I am convinced that poetry kept Anne alive for the eighteen years of her creative endeavors. When everything else soured; when a succession of therapists deserted her for whatever good, poor, or personal reasons, when intimates lost interest or could not fulfill all the roles they were asked to play; when a series of catastrophes and physical illnesses assaulted her, the making of poems remained her one constant.15

“Poetry kept Anne alive.” I don’t know if I am bold enough to aim that high, or face the desperation of the corresponding low. But I don’t think I can deny that this is somehow my best hope as I teach poetry, as group to group the year moves on, time continues, our lives wax or wane as we are able: poetry can keep us alive. And, to return to Hass’s paradigm, I do believe that poetry can help us choose a certain kind of pain over a certain kind of death--help us choose it in such a way that life might potentially result, that death may in some small way depart, be driven back, if only for a few moments more. Further, moving away from a literary framework, on a simply practical level, I believe that poetry (along with creative writing and art as a whole) can be a valuable clinical tool in drug recovery.16

And finally, at my best, I believe what the poet Alicia Ostriker writes, “This is what poetry does: ready or not, it blesses whatever it touches.”17

Endnotes

1. Hass, Robert. “Notes on Poetry and Spirituality.” What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World. New York: Harper Collins, 2012. 301. Print.

2. Mehigan, Joshua. “I Thought You Were a Poet: A Notebook.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Magazine, 1 Jul. 2011. Web. 17 Dec. 2015.

3. Hass, Robert. “Songs to Survive the Summer.” The Apple Trees at Olema. New York: Harper Collins, 2010. 112. Print.

4. Ibid, 117 & 122
5. Ibid,  126-127
6. Ibid, 112-113

7. Tieman, Samuel John, and Walter Bargen. “Haiku Sequence.” Rattle 47, Spring 2015. 61. Print.

8. Ibid.

9. Hayden, Robert. “Those Winter Sundays.” Poetry.org. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 16 Dec. 2015.  

10. Ibid.

11. These last eight stanzas are modeled after Margaret Atwood’s short poem “You Fit into Me.”

12. Sexton, Anne. Anne Sexton: The Complete Poems.  New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Print. 3-4.

13. Ibid.

14. The Book of Common Prayer. Episcopal Church, USA. New York: Church Publishing. 360. Print.

15. Kumin, Maxine. “How it Was.” Anne Sexton: The Complete Poems. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. xxiv. Print.  
16. Snead, Brandon, et al. "The Use Of Creative Writing Interventions In Substance Abuse Treatment." Therapeutic Recreation Journal 49.2 (2015): 179-182. SPORTDiscus with Full Text. Web. 16 Dec. 2015.

In this review of the available research, Snead, Brandon, et al. summarize:

“The Use Of Creative Writing Interventions In Substance Abuse Treatment”: Despite limited research in this area, creative writing activities appear to be a viable treatment intervention that can not only lead to decreased drinking intentions (Young et al., 2013), but can also lead to improvements in depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, and physical health in individuals with substance abuse issues (Meshberg-Cohen et al., 2014). Furthermore, treatment sessions involving creative writing have been linked to improvements in self-confidence/self-esteem, social skills (Alschuler, 2000), social/emotional self-expression/self-disclosure (Alschuler, 2000; Olson-McBride & Page, 2012), coping, self-awareness (Alschuler, 2000; Tyson & Baffour, 2004) and trust (Alschuler, 2000) in this population. If clients have not previously had experience with creative writing, leisure skill development may also occur (Alschuler, 2000). (180)

17. Ostriker, Alicia. “Ecclesiastes as Witness.” For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book. Piscataway: Rutgers University, 2007. 92. Print.